Assuming you aren’t from Ukraine, how much did Ukraine impact your daily life/touch your daily awareness before it became a battlefield? Countries shouldn’t gain more respect just because they’re incorporated as a country, especially when it’s halfway across the world.

(Researched, via Wikipedia and WorldPopulationReview) Missouri has a population of 6.3 million and total land area of ~178K km; larger in size than countries like Greece and Hungary, and more populous than countries like Denmark and Finland and Ireland. So it should be less regarded than any of those countries because it remains a state?

My stance is: either you should believe any population center of a reasonably large size/population density is worth memorizing or you should just memorize the ones relatively important to you.

There are probably distinct provinces in Canada and China outperforming many countries, so why should they exist on a lower tier than a “country”, just because they were persuaded or “persuaded” to incorporate into something larger?